Open Traffic Systems - An Extensible Middleware for Distributed Traffic Management Systems

Public bodies in the role of buyers and operators of traffic management systems are bound to public tendering laws stipulating a competition for the system procurement to benefit from cost reduction and new features. This situation results in manufacturer-mixed systems and distributed system architectures. Communication protocols are one of the key enablers for successful deployment of such systems. Traffic management systems with their long lifecycles impose special demand on extensibility and adaptability of communication protocols. In this paper a middleware as one essential element of such distributed communication architectures will be described. The overall concept is called Open Traffic Systems (OTS).